de Sarthe Gallery is pleased to announce its second exhibition for Hans Hartung titled “Abstraction: A Human Language.” The show opens on November 25th, and will continue through January 13th, 2018. The exhibition will survey a selection of works from the 40s to the very end of his life in 80s.

As early as 1945 Hans Hartung was regarded as one of the most important abstract expressionists. He was invited to the first Documenta at Kassel, in 1955 and was awarded the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and had a major exhibition of his paintings in 1975 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Following the tremendous success of his joint exhibition in our gallery last year, Eric returns to Hong Kong with exquisitely crafted works made on fine paper, wood and leather. Delving into his own imagination, fantasies, knowledge of world history, antique maps and legends and careful observation of cityscapes, Fok converts the gallery into his personal library. An eclectic collection of maps, records and objects are presented which chronicle the evolvement of cities following the Age of Exploration, postcolonial phenomenon and impact of migration of population in the Hong Kong context.

Maps existed before written words. Eric's ‘maps’ have the capability to open worlds of reality and imagination. They evoke hopes and fears. They also pose graphic challenges as Eric strenuously draws on a very small scale, which entails formidable difficulty.

‘Wunderkammer’, ‘golden era’, ‘heritage’ and ‘paradise’ are the keywords of his eagerly awaited solo exhibition in Hong Kong.

About the Artist:

Eric Fok (b. 1990) graduated from the Macao Polytechnic Institute and currently lives and works in Macao and Taipei. Eric has taken part in many exhibitions in Macao, Taiwan, China, Portugal and Spain. His works form part of several prestigious public collections including the Macau Government Headquarters (Governor's Palace), Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macau S.A.R., Oriental Foundation, Macau Museum of Art, The Orient Museum (Portugal), University Museum and Art Gallery (HKU), and private collections in Hong Kong, Macau, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Italy, USA and United Kingdom.

About Karin Weber Gallery:

Established in 1999 by German-born Karin Weber and now in its 18th year, Karin Weber Gallery is one of Hong Kong’s oldest contemporary art galleries. Situated on Aberdeen Street, in the heart of SoHo, the gallery presents a year-round program of curated exhibitions, talks, and collector events.

Karin Weber Gallery has been named one of ‘500 Best Galleries Worldwide’ by BLOUIN ARTINFO in 2015 and 2016 consecutively. The gallery’s unique network of partners based in London, Mumbai and Berlin allows it to source emerging and established contemporary art from around the world.

Karin Weber Gallery is equally passionate about presenting works by local artists. The gallery assists artists through exhibitions, art fairs, and residency programs throughout the world. Small in size, yet global in outlook, Karin Weber Gallery is one of Hong Kong’s truly international boutique galleries.

Massimo De Carlo gallery is pleased to present Double by Carsten Höller. This is the first show by the Belgian-born German artist in Hong Kong.

Renowned for his audience-engaging and inquisitive practice, Carsten Höller, who has begun his professional life as a scientist in agricultural entomology, creates visually striking, often large-scale installations that produce unique experiences in the viewer/user.

In the exhibition Double, the artist presents a series of recent works dealing with the notion of doubling, and doubling the doubled. The double is a recurring theme in the work of the artist, and is epitomized by the acrylic glass sculpture Yellow/Orange Double Sphere, a suspended luminous device composed of two coloured spheres. The work is part of the series Vehicles by Höller, created from 1998 onwards. He suggests using this particular vehicle on a downhill slope, where a person can travel standing inside the inner sphere whilst the outer sphere spins around it when rolling down the hill. The dimensions of Yellow/Orange Double Sphere are designed to accommodate one person standing with spread legs and arms, like Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

The notion of duplication is also present in the work Giant Triple Mushroom, an enlarged replica of three different types of mushrooms, including Amanita muscaria (also known as fly agaric), a highly poisonous type of fungus with psychoactive properties. The work is part of a series of mushroom sculptures that the artist started making in the early 2000s. Questioned about his interests in mushrooms, Höller has said: “the fruiting bodies of fungi, which we call mushrooms, come in a large variety of shapes, colours, and ingredients - but this variety doesn't make sense as they don't communicate and don't want to attract animals in order to spread their spores, as far as we know. There is something going on there that we don't understand. The fly agaric, in it's splendid colourful display and it's toxicity, is an especially striking example of this enigmatic uselessness.”

The artists continues to apply the doubling method in Double Mushroom Vitrine (Twice) a glass vitrine that contains life-sized casts of wild mushrooms: half a fly agaric is mounted to half a fruiting body of another mushroom of similar height. The vitrine contains two of these half/half mushroom replicas.

Grey Dots on Ivory-white Background is part of Carsten Höller’s new series of paintings based on the principle of division. The dots are applied at the exact location where a division would take place if the surface of the painting would be divided in half, and half of it in half again, and so on.

In Golden Tench and Surface a taxidermied goldfish is mounted in front of a painted glass surface. As in the painting, the surface of the glass is divided in half and divided in half again and again and again and again and again. Höller has said earlier that this simple division principle “is a way to reach infinity”. The surface is divided into seven units, with its yellow colour being diluted by 50% white at each division step.

All the works in the exhibition explore the double, both as a mathematical method intended to reach infinity and as a proposition to doubt the perceived entirety of the elements of this world, which includes our “entire, not-doubled” way of looking at them.

Peres Projects and McNamara Art Projects are pleased to present Dean Sameshima, the first show by American artist Dean Sameshima in Hong Kong, featuring a new series of “documentary paintings” based on the artist’s media archive, and a continued investigation of queer desires and nostalgia through the method of documentary. Inherent aspects of his work stretch from repression, persecution, nostalgia for prelapsarian decadence or sexual adventure, to his own journey to understand himself within a specific lineage of cultural references within the queer community.

In his artistic practice, Sameshima is both a collector of images and an archivist. For him, the very act of collection is an exercise in obsession. His work is centered around the accumulation and reworking of imagery which pertains to DIY movements, punk and queer culture; imagery which, whether culled from the internet, magazines, encyclopedias, or pornographic publications, operate like notes from the underground and coded signifiers of gay culture. In this way, Sameshima is conserving the fragile narratives of subculture and marginalized social groups, revising their symbols and languages into compositions, and in effect, giving them a new context, a life resurrected.
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The compositions of his new paintings are based on book covers, receipts and black and white photocopies from the artists’ extensive library. With each work, Sameshima encounters the documentary power of painting, and its own capability to “record” in a seemingly pragmatic way, like a snapshot or a photocopy. Despite the machine-made quality one at first encounters in viewing the numbers, dates, and information which float alone on his canvases, there is something implicitly human which the viewer arrives at by moving closer to Sameshima’s works. It is that their very existence, the lengthy and contemplative painterly process from which they were selected and came into being, is an act of self-preservation, and, more politically, an important step towards uplifting queer and forgotten histories.

Everyday life is considered by Sin Sin Man a practice to achieve a state of enlightenment. She has always been meditating the unfathomable origin of the world and tries to balance the dualistic forces yin and yang – as an experience of cosmic harmony.

The constantly shifting patterns of these energies explain all natural phenomena. To be content as a human being, one must accept universal forces and the inevitability of change. With it comes harmony.

Sin Sin Man applies various media in her works including metal, wood, mirror, textile and light to emphasize simplicity, spontaneity and a natural appearance. Each art work represents a lifetime of hope, joys, fears and doubts – harmonized by the artist.